Harry Potter Cards and Inexplicably Starry Scabbers

[stuttermoan]

Today, while cleaning my room, I found a box of cards from the Harry Potter Trading Card Game. I remember finding them in a store a few years ago and buying them with the intention of scanning images. Here are a few with particularly interesting character depictions.


Snape, looking uncharacteristically happy:



Lily with frogspawn:



The Dursleys, looking snooty:



Percy, most likely experiencing pwnage at the hands of the twins:



The Trio, along with inexplicably starry Scabbers:



Scabbers is pictured again by himself here, both starry and blinged out:



In both images, he's got black stars on his fur. A few years back, laverinth posted about this weirdness. There is absolutely nothing in the books about stars on Scabbers. The only reason I can dredge up is that, over a decade ago, some marketing person thought he looked too plain and decided to jazz him up to appear more magical. Seriously, if anyone has more info about starry Scabbers, please share it!

Comments

[estherthegb]

Happy Snape is scary o.O

[stuttermoan.livejournal.com]

Indeedy. It's hard to see in the scan, but he's got long, black fingernails. Maybe he was feeling perkygoth that day

[laverinth.livejournal.com]

Wow. I can't believe you even remembered that post. XD Or did you find it through a search?

[stuttermoan.livejournal.com]

A bit of both, actually. I remembered that someone had mentioned the unexplained black stars on plush Scabbers as a tie-in to a challenge, but I couldn't remember where or when. I probably saw your post listed on a newsletter somewhere. Gosh, fandom time sure travels funny, because when I found the cards and remembered your post, I thought to myself, "Hm, I read something about that the other day..." as if four years hadn't gone by since then.

[arcanetrivia]

(warning, comment on very old post here!)

My guess on the stars on Scabbers is that it's to make him look like a magical rat (stars are magic, right?) and possibly to hint that at the fact that he's not even just a magical rat, but in fact a wizard. (I think the copyright dates on these cards are after PoA...)

[stuttermoan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess that must be it. It still mystifies me! Also, they put a collar and a bracelet on him. The same collar and bracelet even show up on plush versions of Scabbers (which are kind of disturbing if you think about having a cuddly toy version of Peter Pettigrew). J.K. Rowling has been occasionally replying to tweets these days. Maybe I'll tweet her about it.